Logger to pay $500,000 to settle dumping suit

Published 1:00 am, Monday, February 13, 2006

A Redding logging company and its owner Peter Davis III must pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit that involves illegal dumping in Bethel.

Attorney General
Richard Blumenthal
said the company "turned its leased property into a sea of stumps, logs and debris-showing contempt for our environmental laws."
Davis Tree & Logging leased land from the
Bernard J. Dolan Company
, and without the company's knowledge, illegally dumped debris, including construction and demolition waste, Blumenthal said.
The company has to pay $350,000 in a civil penalty to the state and $150,000 to Dolan. The $150,000 is partial compensation for clean-up costs.
The logging company leased the property located on Grassy Plain Road in Bethel to Davis from 1998 until 2000, Blumenthal said. That property is the site of a condominium project called The Villages at Timber Oak.
The lawyer for Davis and his company,
Neil Marcus
, said this was a "dispute between landlord and tenant that the DEP got involved with."
Marcus said his client knew it was his responsibility to clean up the debris, but because he got into a dispute with Dolan's company and ended their tenant/landlord relationship in December of 2000, he was unable to get back on the property to clean it up.
"The reality is my client got evicted by the landlord and left behind all his materials," Marcus said. Marcus said the debris left behind was hardly harmful to the environment. The debris was stumps, topsoil, mulch and woodchips, Marcus said. "Whatever was left on the site started to rot away," Marcus said. "I don't see it as bad stuff for the environment."
"Nobody was going to die from this stuff. Nobody was going to claim their well water was poisoned," Marcus said.
Blumenthal said that half of the civil penalty will go toward a state
Department of Environmental Protection
program to increase awareness of and compliance with state forestry and solid waste management laws. The other half will go to the state's General Fund, he said.